HTML5 roundup: Mozilla demos standards-based video chat in Firefox

Mozilla is adding WebRTC support to Firefox in an experimental branch. The …

Mozilla recently published a demo of standards-based video chat in an experimental build of Firefox. The functionality is built with the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard, which aims to support streaming audio and video communication on the Web without relying on plugins.

The WebRTC standard is currently in the draft stage, but it has been endorsed by most of the major browser vendors. Some initial components are already available in several browsers. The underlying technology comes from Global IP Solutions, which Google acquired in 2010. Google opened the source code of the original implementation under a BSD license in order to facilitate its standardization.

We have previously written about WebRTC JavaScript APIs that provide programmatic access to a live video stream from the user's webcam. That's obviously just one part of the WebRTC feature set. There are also APIs for establishing peer-to-peer connections for efficiently streaming audio and video. Mozilla's demo shows how those features can be used to implement full video chat in the Web browser with native HTML and JavaScript.

The WebRTC support is currently being developed in a Firefox branch. According to a comment from Anant Narayanan of Mozilla Labs, the developers hope to get the feature rolled into the mainline and make it available in nightly builds within the next few months. Google has already rolled out some early WebRTC features, such as the camera access APIs, in the Chrome developer channel. Google added a nice permission dialog last month that will display when a Web application requests access to a camera.

It's worth noting that the WebRTC standard is under heavy development and is still undergoing major revisions. It is being drafted through a WebRTC W3C working group, which announced some major API changes last month. When the dust settles and the standard is mature, it's likely to see widespread adoption, eliminating the need for plugins to enable video chat.

HTML5 bullets

Mozilla's WebRTC video chat demo is a nice step forward, but we also have several other noteworthy news items and cool tech demos to share in our roundup this week.

Sencha, the company behind the popular Sencha Touch toolkit, has written an entry in its HTML5 Scorecard series about Apple's new iPad. Due to performance regressions and the removal of true localStorage persistence in application-embedded Web views, Sencha says that the new iPad is a step backwards for mobile Web developers.

An open source project called PouchDB aims to build a portable JavaScript implementation of CouchDB that can be used in Web applications. CouchDB is a popular NoSQL database system with a JSON document storage format and sophisticated synchronization features. PouchDB, which is built on the IndexedDB standard, can sync with CouchDB instances.

A major vulnerability in Java has recently drawn attention in the press. Mozilla recently blacklisted older versions of the Java browser plugin in order to protect users who haven't been updated to a patched version. A Mozilla security engineer issued a statement this week to describe the situation in greater detail and explain the risks of using an outdated version of Java.

We've recently had a lot of coverage about how browser vendors are working to improve the standards-based open Web as a gaming platform. Developers who are interested in taking advantage of these capabilities might want to check out a really nice roundup from Web Insight Labs that discusses 15 HTML5 game engines.